Play It Again, Sam

February 22, 1998|By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ

Readers with hardier brain cells than mine have written and called to correct my essay on adolescent mischief titled "Mooned Over Miami." Recalling the romantic-comedy film Blame It on Rio, I wrongly wrote that the older character played by Michael Caine was seduced by the very young Demi Moore. Gently, my readers reminded me that Caine and Moore were not lovers in the film but dad and daughter. Adding incest to injury, I got the characters and plot wrong.

One is supposed to check things out before writing about them, and I had trusted my own memory, that faulty piece of equipment. One of my readers said the film was her family's favorite, which accounts for her better recall: She gets to see it time and again.

Thanks to video we can all watch our favorite movies as often as we want. We can even build a film library, something that until recently was the privilege of curators of important film collections. These repeated viewings gave my readers the kind of familiarity with the comedy in question that I didn't have.

Years ago I took up film studies seriously - too seriously, if you ask me - and pondered over the many theories that speculate about this art. Some of those theories were so obtuse that I have forgotten them completely, if I ever managed to understand them. But there was one newfangled one that I found intriguing.

The basis of this approach is phenomenology. Which, put plainly, means that, more than an artifact, a movie is an experience. And, in turn, that means that what happens to the viewer is as worth noting as what happens in the movie. I am attracted to that approach because, like for most people, the movie experience has been, in my life, precisely that: an experience. I grew up seeing films in movie palaces, with all the accouterments: popcorn, newsreels, previews, cartoons, double features. Why, there were even live shows (magic acts, stand-up comedians) after nighttime weekend screenings when I was a kid.

Video meant many chances to see a movie again and forever. But, serious film buffs of an older generation were - I would learn years later - already watching movies over and over, and catching old ones they had never seen, at second-run neighborhood theaters. From this experience film studies were born, allowing buffs to become film critics and serious filmmakers. Still, it was a movie-theater experience, not today's videomania.

Lacking the film libraries now available, anyone wanting to talk or even write about film was likely to make mistakes. I am not trying to justify mine, but in my readings on film phenomenology I encountered a fascinating hypothesis. One writer claimed that the mistakes one makes on recalling a film are part of the film experience. This makes a certain sense. But watching movies and talking about them, an aesthetic activity everyone does, is based not on an artifact at hand but on our memory of it. And if memory fails us, then that flaw is incorporated into the aesthetic experience. Sometimes the flaw is not noticing flaws.

For years I knew precisely the movie moment when the star John Wayne was born. Oh, he had made lots of cheap cowboy films. But when the stagecoach in Stagecoach comes up to the Ringo Kid you know that shot of the Duke is it. Mythical, larger than life, a loner, an outsider, cool, moral, Wayne enters not just film history but the vast panorama of American culture. What I didn't recall, until one day when I was psyched to see that shot again, was that it is momentarily out of focus. Some sloppy lens work, I guess. But I am tempted to see in that blurred second or two something more significant. The moment a myth emerges from the fog of the subconscious, from the penumbra of undifferentiated phenomena: a true birth experience. Thanks to repeated watchings I now know exactly what that shot looks like. But Stagecoach is a masterpiece, it deserves multiple viewings. As does the film most of us old movie lovers love to watch over and over, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, the film Chili Palmer, that film-buff gangster, catches in Get Shorty. He knows the last lines by heart, something that impressed the critics. Big deal, so do I. And it's possibly the biggest dismissal of all the nonsense film critics write, perhaps of all the nonsense we journalists write: "What does it matter what you say about people?"